You Gotta Serve Somebody

Romans 6:17-18 (NKJV) But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

I was thinking about the independence we have through the freedom that was secured for us through the work of Jesus on the cross.
Paul tells us in Romans 6 that we were slaves to sin and that when we were slaves of sin, we were free in regard to righteousness. (vs.20) Being free in regards to righteousness means that we were unrestrained and did what we wanted and in some cases what we did not want to do but we were slaves to sin.
But being free in Christ does not mean that we are no longer slaves. We just serve a different Master. We have a master that has redeemed us at a great price with an even greater motive….love.
Paul goes on to say in Romans 6:22 that … having been set free from sin, we have become slaves of God. We are slaves that have been bought with a price and that price was the precious blood of Jesus. Having been set free we choose to become slaves. We are bondservants …slaves of choice. Paul concludes vs.22 with, "you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life."
Because we have obeyed God; we have believed. Now we have the opportunity to live righteously, and so also, to begin to serve God with the same fervor and energy with which we were serving sin. Our motive needs to be love too. The love returned to God for His great gift of salvation to us through Jesus. Now it is our choice and that choice is not made out of obligation but response to God’s love. We need to let righteousness enslave us and let it become the bondage and habit of our life.
It is impossible to be neutral. Every person has a master—either God or sin. Bob Dylan wrote a song a long time ago called “You Gotta Serve Somebody” and in it he said, “You may serve the devil or you may serve the Lord but you gotta serve somebody. A Christian is not someone who cannot sin, but someone who is no longer a slave to sin. He or she belongs to God. Before we were converted we had to serve sin. As Christians we have the freedom to live independent of sin but completely dependent on God.